andrewducker | I'm made of meat

within five years or shortly before my imminent death, whichever comes first

From:

andrewhickey.livejournal.com

"It was removed by the original author"
I don't recall it that way, but that's rather a side issue if, as you say, "Yudkowsky pointed out what a potentially destructive post it was to make". That confirms my basic point - he believed a disagreement with himself to be 'destructive'.

"No-one knows how to build the safeguards Yudkowsky talks about"
No-one knows how to build an AI which would need such safeguards either.

"and the opinion of mainstream AI is that there is no such danger."
Who is this 'mainstream AI'? As far as I can tell, most mainstream AI researchers don't believe there's a danger because what they're doing is not going to lead to anything close to general intelligence for many, many decades. That's not a judgement on the danger of a malicious artificial intelligence, but on the likelihood of one being created at all in the near future.
Put it this way - I'm entirely convinced that a vampire hiding under my bed would be horribly dangerous, but I don't take a wooden stake and garlic to bed with me every night...

"SIAI are not coding an AI at all"
Kind of my point. But Yudkowsky has stated several times that that is their eventual aim, and that he thinks Java would be the best tool to do the work in.

"The "cult" bogeyman is incredibly tiresome; it's addressed here."
What that essentially boils down to is that Yudkowsky doesn't consider 'cult' a useful term. I do, and if someone states that he and only he has the ability to save the universe, that donating money to his organisation is the single most important thing anyone else in the world can do, and that minor disagreement endangers the whole human race, then 'cult' seems to me a reasonable descriptor.

None of which is to say that Yudkowsky doesn't have some good ideas - he can, when he wishes, explain a lot of rather complex scientific ideas in very easily-comprehensible terms. I also believe he very sincerely believes everything he writes and says. But that doesn't make his organisation any less of a dead end.

But I should probably continue this on my own blog tonight, rather than filling up Andrew's comments with this...

From:

andrewducker

Don't stop on my account - I'd rather have dialogue between two smart people (which is what I consider both of you to be) on my journal than blogposts elsewhere :->